Dear All
When I went to install an otherwise unemployed SCSI zip drive on one of our
Sparc Ultra 5's (as a quick access secondary back-up device for the
students here) I noticed that the relevant AMMRL archives seem to peter out
a couple of years back. Here's an update on zip/jazz(?) drive installation
under solaris.
(i) Sun has tacit support for removable SCSI devices from solaris 2.6
onwards... just uncomment the relevant entry in /etc/vold.conf as suggested
in
http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/sun-stuff.html and "boot -r" in the
normal way (source code is apparently available for a prog that will allow
you to use rmscsi devices under volume management for version 2.5... we're
using 2.7 here so our experience is confined to that system)
(ii) Andy Polyakov has made "ziptools for Solaris 2.x" publicly available
http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/ziptool.html (pre-compiled and source are
available). In our experience (short though it may be) it's working fine
(and has been approved by our local CIT wizz - although we take NO
responsibility, of course) and works ok for all users when installed with
"set-root-uid" as outlined on the page. (Note that most users here aren't
UNIX literate and only access peripherals via the desktop - see below - so
there's been no real need for us to test drive all possible command
arguments).
(iii) One (quite big) drawback is that when ziptools is used as supplied,
disks formatted with sun formatting give only 79Mb free space rather than
the expected 100Mb. There's probably a logical explanation for this but as
79Mb is ok for present purposes I haven't pursued the issue (all quick
fixes/work-arounds would be greatly appreciated of course).
(iv) Jazz remains unknown (mainly because we don't have a user who's
recently upgraded to a USB device and is now sitting on a surplus SCSI
Jazz)... please let us know if anyone has / has had success with a similar
"simple" method to below...
(v) Finally, our quicky fix solution to enable non-unix proficient users
easy zip access follows (Note that CDE proficient managers will
undoubtedly find a tidier mechanism (please forward) - we just cheated and
invoked open windows file managers from within CDE - because we wanted it
to work but didn't want to spend a large amount of time fussing.)
(a) Formatting - I've erred on the side of caution and have decided to
limit formatting to the unix literate, thus "ziptool /dev/rdsk/c1t5d0s2
\$sun" remains a shell command
(b) Copying files and ejecting- We chose to simply install these as custom
commands in the OWFM menu. Thus we have an "eject zip" alias for "eject
rmscsi" and an "open zip" alias for "filemgr -d /rmscsi/rmscsi0 &".
Finally, as a number of of users are VERY unix illiterate we installed an
icon alias in the application submenu of the CDE toolbar for the
appropriate "shell script" to launch an initial OWFM that puts them in
their home directory. Selecting "open zip" from within this FM produces the
companion FM so they can easily copy & paste their files to and from the
zip disk. Note that our "easy installation/easy access" approach is of
course not without limitations. Our users are warned that the method
doesn't call forth multiple windows informing them of the progress of the
copy process - rather they should "watch the little yellow light on the
drive and be a little patient". We also instruct them to check the size of
the directory contents by selecting "information..." in the file menu of
the OWFM prior to beginning the copy process as the process won't cease
automatically when the media is full. Finally, we remind them that they
must close the zip disk window prior to ejecting the disk.
Hope this helps one or two labs
Cheers
Sue
Dr Sue Boyd
Research Fellow & Manager Griffith University Magnetic Resonance Facility
School of Science, Griffith University
Nathan QLD,
Australia, 4111
Ph 61 7 3875 7636
Fax 61 7 3875 7656
Alternate Email: nmr-manager_at_mailbox.gu.edu.au
Received on Wed Aug 02 2000 - 10:46:12 MST